Ergi
Ergi *'Description: '''Magic-seeking ritual transgressors. *'Dress: Ergi are known for wild, constantly-changing wardrobes, which is kind of impressive given that they try to avoid wearing anything that is directly linked to what role they were born into in this world, gender, metatype, orientation. Most of them wear clothes and make-up that obscure the details of their identities. There’s no pattern to their clothes, as they put a lot of effort into being more shocking, more flash than each other. The one thing they do generally wear in common is some kind of mystical talisman or symbol, unique. Some even have it tattooed, so it’ll be with them when they’re naked. Those that can afford it wear feywear, actual magical clothing, although that's pretty rare because of the cost, although high-quality imitation feywear is fairly common. *'''Symbols: The Sacred Chao, a yin/yang with a golden apple in one half and a pentagon in the other. A pink teacup. The Flying Spaghetti Monster. The transsexual peace sign, with a male arrow, a female cross and a hermaphrodite crossed arrow coming out of a peace sign. Or really any symbols of uncertainty and liminal spaces. *'Lingo: '''The Ergi make it a point to be cryptic. The Ergi is a bit of an exclusive club and they like nothing better than to confuse outsiders, called variously ‘muggles’, ‘greyfaces’, ‘goronit’ or whatever they’re calling everybody that's not them this week. They talk in riddles and in-jokes and pepper their speech with Sperethiel and or’zet and any dead or, even better, imaginary languages they can dredge up, like Volapuk or Klingon. They even play a game where they test each other to see if they can guess if its a real word or one they just made up on the spot. Unlike their counterparts in the Twin Cities, this includes the Hmong Daw for the Fargo Ergi scene. *'Music: '''Ergi tend to found listening to WizPunk, old-school Elf Rock and a fair bit of rap-ajo from across the border . Local bands include Not What You Are, Red Raven and Hyperzip. Also, its not well known but the successful Twin Cities band Background County was originally part of the Fargo Ergi scene. Ergi is a Twin Cities import. The scene got started back in the MSPlex as a kind of response to the first big Ascomanni Norse revival. Before that, the people who would become the Ergi, mostly corp-kids, were just magical groupies who took up the whole Native American copycat/wizard-groupie aesthetic (in the days after the Great Ghost Dance, in the upper Midwest, the two ideas, Native American and magic, were inextricably linked) mostly as a way to shock or frighten their parents, who had often lived through the traumatic days of the Awakening. But with the coming of the Ascomanni, who reviled magic users and the kids that copied them as 'ergi', guilty of unmailiness, that all changed and those labeled Ergi banded together to take the derogatory title and make it their own. They even started calling each other 'Ergi' (like 'nerd' or 'weeabo' before it) before there was even an actual scene. But the Ergi scene didn’t really coalesce until the Comet Scare in ‘62. What had been a label, at best a high school clique, suddenly became a full-fledged Scene. It gave all these magic-crazed kids, mystics and cultists some place to come together, a social place to share their experiences and concerns, with a growing awareness in a generation that hadn’t known the Awakening of the power of magic in a world that they thought so solid. As well as the usual counter-culture fixtures of weird drugs and inadvisable sex. After the Comet, the Scene provided a place to belong for a lot of those changed by the SURGE and for those who could just sympathize with what it feels like to be a freak. The Scene has gone strong since then, built around gender acceptance, a love of magic and the Awakened and the always-popular ‘worrying the grown-ups’. It is definitely an adolescent scene, often a phase, or something that one only does on weekends. It was after the Year of the Comet that Ergi really came into its own and SURGElings in other places, like Fargo, started to pick up 'Ergi' culture as a way to make sense of what had just happened to them. Interestingly enough, it should be noted for completeness, that there are very few actual mages in the ranks of the Ergi. Unrequited love features very strongly in a lot of the music the scene gravitates to, because the scene is mostly made up of those whose love for magic is unrequited, a few adepts here and there or an untrained caster but for the most part, interested mundanes. Naturally, one of the things that has attracted these wanna-be mage scenesters in recent years is the designer drug Tempo. And much like their big-city counterparts in the MSPlex, they seem to have found a new source (probably through their big-city counterparts in the MSPlex) after its supposed to be unavailable. Hangouts * The Square Round (upper deck only) * The Dike * Kaldi's * Paradox Junction, a lot of these kids are heavily into their favorite fandoms. * Trollwood School for the Performing Arts, where a lot of the Goblinized Ergi first met. Return to: CultureCategory:Culture Category:Magic